1. In his 1589 treatise, The Arte of English Poesie, George Puttenham
registered the following complaint on behalf of poets: "… in these dayes (although
some learned Princes may take delight in them) yet vniuersally it is not so.
For as well Poets and Poesie are despised, & the name become, of honorable
infamous, subiect to scorne and derision" (13-14). He speculates: "peradventure
in this iron and malitious age of ours, Princes are lesse delighted in it,
being ouer earnestly bent and affected to the affaires of Empire & ambition"
(16). And so it goes today. The prevailing modes of late 20th century literary
criticism privilege the "affaires of Empire & ambition" and systematically
marginalize discourse on poetry qua poetry.[1] For
example, Puttenham's definition of poetry as, "a skill to speake & write
harmonically: and verses or rime be a kind of Musicall vtterance, by rason
of a certaine congruitie in sounds pleasing the eare" (53), strikes the postmodern
"eare" as unpleasantly antiquated or, for lack of a better term, charming
in its quaintness. Sir Philip Sidney terms poetry, "words set in delightful
proportion, either accompanied with, or prepared for, the well-enchanting
skill of music" (Sidney 124). Admission of " a certaine congruitie" in poetry
is not now routine, and perhaps the most often overlooked congruity is prosody.
[2]

2. Of course, it is easy to deconstuct Puttenham's contrast between "Empire,"
or the administration of colonial power, and poetry: poetry bears the inscriptions
of power and other cultural variables, as we well know. Yet, unfairly vilified
by critics as a preoccupation with "untranslatable formal perfection" (Greenblatt
4), prosody endures untouched by the prodigious changes in critical practice.
The commentary of early modern practitioners and critics themselves, however,
refute the current neglect of prosodic research. Many of the period's rhetorical
manuals, private letters, book prefaces and academic treatises affirm the
importance of meter as both an aurally and physically affecting phenomenological
experience and a crucial participant in the ideologically-bound codes signaling
the economic, moral, and racial status of both subjects and objects, for better
or worse. Consequently, the following pages explore meter in theory, now and
then, with special attention given to re-examining conventional writings that
depict the effects of rhythm on the body and the relation of poetic form to
the politics of cultural identity. This is formalism, but not "empty formalism"
(Veeser xi). The ultimate goal is to articulate, provisionally, a new theoretical
and historical contextualization of early modern prosody.

3. A precedent for this task is set by Bruce Smith in The Acoustic
World of Early Modern England, a book with much to offer our sense of
how language reverberated within the wooden O. Smith's mapping of the early
modern soundscape is deep and compelling, and I hope this essay is seen as
complementing it by appending metrical verse to the theatre's sonic range.
Excavating the aural texture of human voices, or metered voices, that once
pervaded early modern theatres, Smith notes, is a nearly unattainable illusion,
but some lineaments of the early modern voice may be retrieved, such as "volume,
pitch, and rhythm … three quantitative reference points for plotting the repertory
of voice sounds that scripts for the public stage imply" (223). With estimable
discipline, Smith's inquiry anatomizes vocal volume and pitch, yet rhythm
receives scant attention and, not surprisingly, scrutiny of poetic meter is
wanting. [3]

4. Theorist Amittai Aviram contends that modern scholars consider meter a
symbol of "bourgeois conformism, and musicality is always, oddly, discovered
in sounds that are repeated but have no regularity" (192). Smith's neglect
of poetic meter, willful or not, is reminiscent of Julia Kristeva's in Revolution
in Poetic Language. As Aviram notes, Kristeva excludes from her consideration
of poetic rhythm, "the most obvious and most effective rhythmic principle
in most poetry, audible meter" (Aviram 188). In Smith's defense, not all dramatic
language was in verse, and not all of that verse was metrically regular, but
an abundance was, and this certainly impacted how playgoers and actors would
have experienced and assimilated dramatic poetry.

5. For example, here is a satiric image from Joseph Hall's Virgidemarium
of playgoers remarkably absorbed in an actor's iambs during a staging of Christopher
Marlowe's Tamburlaine:

There if he can with termes Italianate,
Big sounding sentences, and words of state
Faire patch me up his pure Iambicke verse,
He ravishes the gazing Scaffolders (qtd. in Gurr 219)

Attaining a ravished state from exposure to blank verse was probably not
a common occurrence. Nevertheless, Hall seemed assured his audience would
laugh at the "gazing Scaffolders," if not with them. To complicate matters
further, being ravished in the early modern period could have denoted a more
abstract mental state, yet in the context of Hall's detail a few lines before
of "poore hearers" with "hayre quite upright" suggests auditors in a metrically
induced trance. [4]

6. Thomas May's The Heir, a Fletcherian tragicomedy, includes
an interesting homage to Richard Burbage. High above "gazing Scaffolders,"

… Ladies in the boxes
Kept time with sighs and tears to his sad accents
As he had been the man he seem'd. (qtd. in Gurr 44) [5]

In both of the above descriptions, the authors ascribe notable affective
powers to meter as they also imply a patent and bizarre weakness for meter
in the audiences.

7. Conversely, Stephen Gosson, in The School of Abuse, thinks
this weakness a dangerous moral deficiency. Gosson explains why music is used
in battle, "not to tickle the eare, but to teach euery souldier when to strike
and when to stay, when to flye, and when to followe" (25). The purpose of
music is to teach, or instruct, not to tickle, or delight the ear. Gosson
sides with "Pythagoras," who "bequeathes them a Clookebagg, and condemnes
them for fooles, that iudge Musicke by sounde and eare" (26). When Puttenham
and Sidney relate poetry to music, they invite harsh criticism on two fronts,
not just one. Poetry causes moral degeneration for Gossen, as does music,
and the prime device of that evil is the ear, instrument of the insubordinate
passions that, inevitably, overcome reason:

There set they abroche straunge consortes of melody, to tickle the
eare; costly apparel, to flatter the sight; effeminate gesture, to
rauish the sence; and wanton speache, to whet desire too inordinate
lust ... But these by the priuie entires of the eare, slip down into
the hart, and with gunshotte of affection gaule the minde, where reason
and vertue should rule the roste (32).

The insurgent ear does not act in isolation. Gosson's imagined combat between
the sensorium and reason leads, oddly enough, into the writings of his well
known respondent, Sir Philip Sidney.

8. In 1583, Sidney grumbled that much of the bad poetry circulating in England
was but "a tingling sound of rhyme, barely accompanied with reason" (148).
This form of poetry was inferior for Sidney because rhyme for rhyme's sake,
or the ear's sake, was purposeless. Sidney's position on meter, like many
writers, suffers from inconsistency for which he cannot be held culpable.
Sidney expressed indifference to prosody: "… the greatest part of poets
have appareled their poetical inventions in that numbrous kind of writing
which is called verse—indeed but appareled, verse being but an ornament and
no cause to poetry" (111). He maintains, "it is not rhyming and versing
that maketh a poet." Nonetheless, Sidney has praise for contemporary English
poetry that, "with his rhyme, striketh a certain music to the eare" (155),
yet he qualifies: "poesy must not be drawn by the ears" (146). If not, then
how does one hear "the planetlike music of poetry" (Sidney 157)?

9. Numerous early modern writers on poetry meditated on the paradoxical strengths
and weaknesses of metrical verse, but few do so with the indiscriminate appetite
of George Puttenham, whose critique exemplifies the heterodox range of narratives
constituting early modern prosody. In the third book entitled "Of Ornament"
in The Arte of English Poesie, he supplies an exegesis of "ornament
poeticall," which, he asserts, is of two types:

one to satisfie & delight th'eare onely by a goodly outwarde
shew set vpon the matter with wordes and speaches smothly and tunably
running, another by certaine intendments or sence of such wordes &
speaches inwardly working a stirre to the mynde. (119)

The division invoked between delighting the ear and stirring the mind warrants
inspection: What kind of pleasure does Puttenham believe an early modern auditor
would have derived from poetry with "th'eare onely," that is, without the
aid of the mind?

10. At first glance, the distinction between the "outwarde shew" that
delights the ear and the inward stirring of the "mynde" seems to prefigure
the tired partitioning of external form and internal content. This is not
the case. Though figures work in one of two ways, "some of them serue th'eare
onely, some serue the conceit onely and not the'eare," (119),: "There be of
them also that serue both turnes as common seruitours appointed for th'one
and th'other purpose" (119). The first type

doth serue th'eare onely and may be therefore called Auricular:
your second serues the conceit onely and not th'eare, and may be called
sensable, not sensible nor yet sententious: your third sort
serues as well th'eare as the conceit, and may be called sententiousfigures. (166) [6]

The polar opposition becomes a spectrum: the ear and the mind are separate,
yet interdependent and the two poles of the spectrum represent functions of
language. One to "delight th'eare onely" with smoothly running speech, the
other to work "a stirre to the mynde," a differentiation analogous to that
made by modern theorists between the semantic and nonsemantic functions of
poetic utterance.

11. In The Rhythms of English Poetry, Derek Attridge distinguishes

between semantic and nonsemantic functions of poetic rhythm, that
is, between those aspects which operate within the same space as the
meanings of the poem's words, whether to reinforce, limit, expand,
or modify them, and those which operate on some other axis, contributing
to the total working of the poem but not to its meaning' in the narrow
sense. (Attridge 286)

This "other axis" entails response that is not strictly intellectual, but
is best characterized as "muscular participation, whether in the tapping of
a finger or the movement of the whole body in dance" (Attridge 77).

12. But, how can one discuss nonsemantic functions in language that is obdurately
semantic? The critic Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht concedes that, "scholarly description
cannot be achieved without semantics and the dimension of representation,"
yet, he continues, "This does not mean, however, that all phenomena that become
the object of scholarly description are themselves descriptions and must therefore
be presented with the question of what they mean or want to express" (171).
Kristeva in Revolution in Poetic Language makes a related claim pertaining
to representation of the chora which is "analogous only to vocal or
kinetic rhythm" (26). She writes,

Although our theoretical description of the chora is itself part
of the discourse of representation that offers it as evidence, the
chora, as ruptures and articulations (rhythm), precedes evidence,
verisimilitude, spatiality, and temporality. (26)

The chora's operations, then, "precede or transcend language" (27), yet it
is not exempted from discursive practice entirely.

13. In like manner, Aviram confirms: "Words, as meaningful signs, can
describe rhythm or define it, but cannot replace it, that is, be it" (sic,
20). Thus, he continues, "the power of rhythm is not a meaning effect; it
does not participate in the process of signification. It is a power without
rational meaning, a sublime force" (223). The sublime in Aviram's theory is
"a sense of infinitude, or excess, specifically in relation to language" (19),
thereby rhythm exists beyond the contingencies of semantic meaning. Aviram
allows that poetic form alludes to "certain traditions and authority figures,"
but he emphasizes the "effect of rhythm that goes beyond signs, beyond meaning
in a semiotic sense" (21). Aviram explicitly positions himself alongside Nicolas
Abraham who states succinctly: "we know rhythm only by our experience of it"
(Abraham 70).

14. What, then, was the early modern experience of metrical rhythm? It
had much to do with physical movement, with running, walking, and limping.
As quoted above, the purpose of form, Puttenham states, is "to satisfie &
delight th'eare onely by a goodly outwarde shew set vpon the matter with wordes
and speaches smothly and tunably running" (119). This appears to be a rather
uncomplicated representation with which we are relatively familiar: the image
of a poem running along smoothly. It is, instead, an especially suggestive
image of the physical effects of audible, metrical rhythm.

15. Puttenham opens his discussion of form in book two by describing
verse feet in terms of literal human feet.[7] He states:

a foote by his sence naturall is a member of office and function,
and serueth to three purposes, that is to say, to go, to runne, &
to stand still; so as he sometimes must be swift, sometimes slow,
sometime unegally marching or peradventure steddy. (55-6)

Puttenham continues with what he deems the best metrical analogy:

nothing can better shew the qualitie [of meter] then these runners
at common games, who setting forth from the first goale, one giueth
the start speedely & perhaps before he come half way to th'other
goale, decayeth his pace, as a man weary & fainting: another is
slow at the start, but by amending his pace keepes euen with his fellow
or perchance gets before him; another one while gets ground, another
while loseth it again, either in the beginning or middle of his race,
and so proceedes unegally, sometimes swift sometimes slow, as his
breath or forces serue him: another sort there be that plod on, &
will never change their pace, whether they win or lose the game ...
(57).

The oddity of this elaborate metaphor involving verse and human feet should
not go unnoticed. In fact, once noticed, it seems singularly ubiquitous. What
follows is a collection of similar examples in the work of various early modern
authors.

16. Perhaps the most famous instance of the metaphor occurs in Act 3 of Shakespeare's
As You Like It, in the guise of a pun when Touchstone belittles Orlando's
attempts at poetry after Rosalind enters reading the verses aloud. Touchstone
jeers sarcastically: "I'll rhyme you so eight years together, dinners and
suppers and sleeping hours excepted. It is the right butter-women's rank to
market" (3.2.94-96) [8]. After Touchstone teases Rosalind
with a sample of his own extemporaneous poetry, he continues to mock Orlando's
versifying: "This is the very false gallop of verses. Why do you infect yourself
with them?" (3.2.111-12)[9]. Shortly thereafter, Rosalind
and a new participant join in the taunting:

Celia: Didst thou hear these verses?
Rosalind: O, yes, I heard them all, and more too, for some of them
had in them more feet than the verses would bear.
Celia: That's no matter. The feet might bear the verses.
Rosalind: Ay, but the feet were lame and could not bear themselves
without the verse and therefore stood lamely in the verse. (3.2.161-68)

Scholars have explored the textual issues and gender implications of Touchstone's
enigmatic reference to "butter-women," while bypassing the enthusiastic pun
on feet. [10]

17. In Henry IV, 1, Hotspur disparages Glendower's upbringing,
in which he "framèd to the harp / Many an English ditty lovely well"
(3.1.120-1), and makes known his loathing of "meter balladmongers" (3.1.126).
Nonetheless, Hotspur's abusive censure embraces the kinesthetic imagery used
to discuss meter:

I had rather hear a brazen can'stick turned
Or a dry wheel grate on the axletree,
And that would set my teeth nothing on edge,
Nothing so much as mincing poetry.
‘Tis like the forced gait of a shuffling nag.

(3.1.127-131).

These aural images of ballad meter, as a "brazen can'stick turned," a "dry
wheel," and "the forced gait of a shuffling nag," evokes the noise of ear-grating
physical motions.[11] The last animal image of "a shuffling
nag" resonates with the correspondence of Edmund Spenser and Gabriel Harvey
on prosody.

18. Harvey wrote to Spenser that good quantitative verse in English is
like "A good horse, that trippeth not once in a iourney" (Harvey and Spenser
96). Spenser replied by shifting the equestrian focus to other animals. The
"chiefest hardnesse," he writes, of composing quantitative hexameters in English
is:

in the Accente ... and sometime the measure of the Number, as in
Carpenter the middle sillable, being vsed shorte in speache, when
it shall be read long in Verse, seemeth like a lame Gosling that draweth
one legge after hir: and Heauen, beeing vsed shorte as one sillable,
when it is in Verse stretched out with a Diastole, is like a lame
Dogge that holdes vp one legge. (99)

These literally "lame" animals impart bizarre connotations to the commentary
on Orlando's metrical fumblings in As You Like It. When Touchstone
terms Orlando's meter "the very false gallop of verses" (3.2.111), theatre
audiences were likely very familiar with the pun, given that equivalent metaphors
saturated dialogues on meter.

19. The origin of this analogy dates back at least to the opening poem
of Ovid's Amores where the speaker mourns an unusual theft:

[I was preparing to bear arms in solemn numbers, with subject-matter
appropriate to the measure. The subsequent line was well-matched:
Cupid is said to have laughed and stolen one foot.]

Hexameters are the epic meter; by stealing a foot in the second line, Cupid
has turned it into elegiac meter, used for love poetry. The speaker proceeds
to reprimand Cupid for ignoring poetry's province as the reserve of the Muses.
Cupid responds to the accusation with an arrow that quickly inflames the speaker's
heart, who sullenly resigns:

[Let my work march in six numbers, and fall in five; farewell iron
wars with your measures.] [13]

The verb "surgat" (from surgo, surgere) denotes "to rise, to stand
up," but also has the connotation "to march" in war-like contexts, as in the
mock military epic tone of this poem. Given Ovid's proposed preparation to
write heroic war poetry, this allows a translation to read "Let my work march
in six numbers" instead of the less concrete "rise in six numbers" preferred
by most translators.

20. Samuel Daniel, who certainly read his Ovid, disliked the way in which
Latin poets took license with modifiers, claiming that they were too often
"disioyning such as naturally should ... march together" (14). Like so many
others, Daniel adopted the imagery of "running" (17, 42): English trochaic
verse "runnes" similar to ancient verse (34), no verses "runne" (38) free
from disgrace if they are "idle", and some "bare numbers," he claimed, that
are forced to "runne" in "our slow language" will never be popular (7). Thomas
Nashe also had reservations concerning Latin prosody. Latin "Hexamiter," he
proclaimed, is the meter which "goes twitching and hopping in our language
like a man running vpon quagmiers, vp the hill in one Syllable, and down the
dale in another, retaining no part of that stately smooth gate" (Strange
Newes 299).

21. Nashe's representation of meter as clumsy ambling does not have quite
the same derogatory force as the more disquieting images of the halting or
limping poem, images likening metrical defects to human physical disabilities.
A familiar and relatively tame usage occurs in Hamlet, when mulling
over his advice to the players before they arrive, Hamlet worries that "the
lady shall say her mind freely, or the blank verse shall halt for't" (2.2.325-326).
Later, when he expounds upon "the purpose of playing," Hamlet asks that the
player speak his speech, "trippingly on the tongue," in other words, using
a tripping, gamboling motion of the tongue. [14] He then
remembers players "that, neither having th' accent of Christians nor the gait
of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so strutted and bellowed" (3.2.30-32).
In a chiasmatic conflation of speech with physical movement, Hamlet mirrors
in one sentence accent with gait and strutting with bellowing.

22. Recalling Hamlet's halting blank verse, in Much Ado About Nothing,
Claudio mocks Benedict's "halting sonnet" (5.4.86). Similarly, the speaker
of Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, having sought for "words to paint
the blackest face of woe," bemoans that "words came halting forth, wanting
Inventions stay" (Poems 165), and Francisco in John Webster's The
White Devil proclaims:

I am in love,
In love with Corombona, and my suit
Thus halts to her in verse. (4.1.120-2)

Thomas Campion, disparaging native English rhyming, also described nonsensical
ballads, which one is unable to read "without blushing," as "lame halting
rhymes" (6), and John Gower's attempt in Shakespeare's Pericles to
"carry wingèd Time / Post on the lame feet of my rhyme" (4.47-48) prefigures
John Milton's headnote to Paradise Lost that flouts the "wretched matter
and lame Meeter" (352) of most rhyming poetry.

23. In 1570, the educator Roger Ascham gently chided Cicero who "in his
verse doth halt a little" (34), but harshly criticized the verse of two translations.
Ascham had a qualm with the "noble Lord Th. Earle of Surrey, first
of all English men in translating the fourth booke of Virgill, and
GonsaluoPeriz, that excellent learned man, and Secretarie to
kyng Philip of Spaine, in translating the Vlisses of
Homer out of Greke into Spanish." While he commended
them for avoiding "the fault of Ryming," he nevertheless argued that their
lines were not "perfite and trew versifying" (32). Rather he considered their
meter to be as "numme feete" that

turne and runne roundly withall as feete of brasse or wood be vnweeldie
to go well withall. And as a foote of wood is a plaine shew of a manifest
maime, euen so feete in our English versifing without quantitie and
ioyntes be sure signes that the verse is verie vnseemlie ... (33)

While prosthetic body parts were not the most common early modern representation
of metrically unsound feet, Ascham is in ample company when it comes to equating
lame verse with human lameness.

24. Bad poetry was frequently imaged as human physical disability. The problematic
comparisons drew upon assumptions, such as Francis Bacon's, whereby "Deformed
persons," were "(as the Scripture saith) devoid of natural affection" (Bacon
426). Deformity, he argued, was not a sign, but a cause of ill behavior, a
cause that "seldom faileth of the effect" (426). Bacon's words take on remarkable
resonance considering they were published during the reign of a king known
for his physical disability: "his legs were very weake, having had (as was
thought) some foul play in his youth, or rather before he was born, that he
was not able to stand at seven years of age, that weaknesse made him ever
leaning on other mens shoulders" (Weldon) [15]. In this
context, accusation of metrical deformity by way of human infirmity accrues
an unusually multi-valent derisiveness.

25. The common denominator of this compendium of images is the consistent
visual imaging of verse feet as human feet. Bruce Smith is cogent on such
figuration. As he has argued concerning analogous images, "the phenomenon
[a writer] is attempting to describe is fundamentally aural ... And the link
between these two sets of phenomena, visual and aural, is the human body"
(97). Admittedly, asserting a definite link between sight, sound and the human
body from such a historical distance is fraught with problems. It is, as critics
will censure, the "reaffirmation of presence in a different guise" ("Premodern,"
Smith 326). Smith's response: "And so it is." The full rejoinder, actually,
is the proposal of a different critical approach he terms "historical
phenomenology."

26. In this critical formulation, "Texts not only represent bodily experience;
they imply it in the way they asked to be touched, seen, heard, even smelled
and tasted" (326). Most historicist treatment of the body tends to elide physicality,
treating the body instead as one discursive nexus among many, rendering it
invisible by way of the very same critical methodology originally meant to
foreground it. In this formulation, the body becomes important insofar as
it provides access to discursive meaning, and thus a familiar hierarchy is
invoked. As the critic Antony Dawson maintains, in new historicist scholarship,
the body/mind dichotomy, "is replaced by body/abstract meaning, with [discursive]
meaning given the position of dominance" (31). The goal of historical phenomenology
is not only to deepen our knowledge of subjectivity formation, but to augment
what we know about the sensory exchange between actor and audience to the
end of recognizing "the embodiedness of historical subjects" and "the materiality
of the evidence they have left behind," while also acknowledging "the embodiedness
of the investigator in the face of that evidence" ("Premodern," Smith 325)
[16]. Therefore, this essay seeks to initiate the task
of recovering, if only partially, the complex experience of metrical language
for actors and spectators.

27. To conclude, I turn from feet to fingers and hands. The critic Bertram
Joseph has suggested that actor's hands "responded to the metre of declaimed
verse":

Bulwer ... speaks in Chironomia of the "action of the hand" resembling
the "sweet cadencies of numbers." His great authority, Cresollius,
disapproved of orators using "ictus or musicall cadence of the fingers"
in free prose, "though it may be tollerable for the setting of the
intervalls of restrained numbers." If this was allowed in oratory,
it is probable that stage players, not bound by academic restraints,
suited the movements of their hands to those of the verses in their
lines. (79) [17]

Stage players, Abraham Fraunce believed in 1588, were not bound by any restraints.
In cautioning his readers how "gesture must followe the change and varietie
of the voyce," Fraunce notes that "the bodie" should be moved
"not parasiticallie as stage plaiers use, but graulie and decentlie as
becommeth men of greater calling" (120). Hamlet, we know, concurs: "do
not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently" (3.2.4-5).

28. Less conspicious than the sawing of hands, Thomas Campion avers that
the best way to tell the rhythm of a poem is with motion of the hand. To show
that "Latine verses of six feete ... are in nature all the same length of
sound with our English verse of fiue feete," Campion recommends the reader
to "time these verses with his hand" (10). Following this Campion juxtaposes
select Latin verses with English verses so that they may be "tim'd with the
hand." Likewise, in a letter to Spenser, Harvey in passing told that he counted
meter through the "curious scanning and fingering" of feet (96). Other examples
abound. William Webbe also refers to native English meter as a "base kind
of fingering" (228). William Bathe, the music instructor, insisted that rhythmic
time is "schewed to learners, By stricking the hand or foote" (6) and the
Master in Thomas Morley's A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall
Musicke likewise instructed his student Philomathes that a musical stroke
is a "successive motion of the hand" (9). Counting beats with the hand or
fingers was as common in the early modern period as it is now, and we can
trace the practice in poetry at least as far back as Horace who argued that
critics need the ability to detect "true rhythm by the ear and the finger"
(72). [18]

29. Tapping fingers to a metrical beat is considered now to be a relatively
harmless exercise, but then it had its appropriate place, which, if ignored,
could ensure scorn. Thomas Nashe declared that some "Bussards" writing
"ragged Rimes ... thinke knowledge a burthen, tapping it before they
have half tunde it" ("From The Anatomie of Absurditie,"
327). What the hand comes to represent is anxiety concerning meter's ability
to support and, in many cases, determine a poem’s semantic content. Essentially,
a poem’s meter was never to prevail over semantic meaning:

Now there can not be in a maker a fowler fault, then to falsifie
his accent to serue his cadence, or by vntrue orthographie to wrench
his words to helpe his rime, for it is a signe that such a maker [is]
not copious in his owne language, or (as they are wont to say) not
halfe his crafts maister. (Puttenham 67)

For respectable poets, the words came first, and the meter, or music, later.
George Gascoigne warns that the budding writer, for the sake of rhyme, should
not "willingly alter the meanyng of your Inuention" (52). Thomas
Morley’s character Master, a music instructor, goes on at some length concerning
how to "dispose your musicke according to the nature of the words which
you are therein to expresse, as whatsoeuer matter it be which you haue in
hand, such a kind of musike must you frame to it" (177) [19].
Campion concurred that meter and rhyme were little more than an ornament to
the poem’s matter, and even worse, "Rime," that "foolish figuratiue
repetition," could even cause " a man oftentimes to abiure his matter"
(4-6). [20]

30. The phobia of abjuring the poem's subject matter, which is suggestive
of the mind-body split, was translated into an issue of class. Nashe's "Bussards"
were writers of lower class, or folk, poetry, and they were everywhere. Ballads
were so popular that Campion complained "The facilitie and popularitie
of Rime creates as many Poets as a hot sommer flies" (330). Richard Stanyhurst
protested, "Good God, what frye of such woodenrythmours
dooth swarme in stacioners shops" (sic, 141). William Webbe criticized
the "uncountable rabble of ryming Ballet makers and compylers of senceless
sonets, who be most busy to stuffe every stall full of grosse devises and
unlearned Pamphlets" (246). Nashe expressed indignation over the "baling
Ballets, and our new found Songs & Sonets, which every rednose Fidler
hath at his fingers end, and euery ignorant Ale Knight will breath foorth
ouer the potte, as soone as his braine waxeth hote" (Anatomie of Absurditie
23-4). The result of this popularity: "It makes the learned sort to be silent,
when as they see vnlearned sots so insolent" (24). The prosody of the masses,
however similar, was judged inferior.

31. What might this and more such research on prosody tell us? As a colleague
asked, what can this prove beyond the obvious fact that English poets were
aware of the flow of lines and larger structures? It may prove such awareness,
but what begins to crystallize is the fundamentally and resolutely somatic
awareness the period's writers brought to meter. Nonetheless, such a question
misses the point: the fact of their awareness is not at stake, but an understanding
of how they were aware of prosodical structures, culturally and physically,
has the potential to reshape our methods, culturally and physically, of approaching
early modern verse.

[1] More forcefully, Coburn Freer has leveled
the following indictment: "As far as the bulk of published criticism on English
Renaissance drama is concerned, including criticism of Shakespeare, the plays
might as well have been written in prose-highly figurative prose, but prose
nonetheless" (1-2).

[2] Prosody is rarely even acknowledged as
a potential field of study. Treatments of both meter and prosody are absent
from these important reference books: The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary
Theory and Criticism, Critical Terms for Literary Study, and The
Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory. Following suit, the recent
Norton edition of Shakespeare's works includes no mention whatsoever of prosody,
meter, blank verse or iambic pentameter.

[3] At one point, Smith does look at meter,
but only briefly in Campion's 1601 songbook, A Booke of Ayres (Smith
296-7).

[4] Sidney refers to the "heart-ravishing
knowledge" of poetry (Sidney 106). The image of the heart in early modern
literature is, as Scott Manning Stevens has argued, "both metaphorical and
physical in a way" that causes it very often to seem as if it were "on the
verge of losing its materiality" (Stevens 276-7).

[5] For a discussion of women in early modern
theatre audiences, See Richard Levin's essay, "Women in the Renaissance Theatre
Audience."

[6] Metrical patterning is not now classified
as a figure. However, Puttenham writes: "I say that auricular figures be those
which worke alteration in th'eare by sound, accent, time, and slipper volubilitie
in vtterance, such as for that respect was called by the auncients numerositie
of speach" (134).

[7] The OED confirms that the prosodic
"foot" (a translation of Latin pes) is ordinarily thought to refer
to the motion of the foot in beating time.

[8] David Bevington glosses this line: "the
rhymes, all alike follow each other precisely like a line of butter-women
or dairy women jogging along to market" (Bevington 307). The reference here
to "butter-women" in a rank on their way to market has been the subject of
at least three essays in the 1980's (Holdsworth, Parsons, and Taylor). Alan
Brissenden's commentary in the Oxford edition of As You Like It provides
helpful context for Touchstone's puns. All Shakespeare quotations are from
Bevington's edition.

[9] To H. J. Oliver, editor of the New Penguin
Shakespeare As You Like It, this line suggests a similar usage by Nashe:
"I would trot a false gallop through the rest of his Verses, but that if I
should retort his rime dogrell aright, I must make my verses (as he doth his)
run hobling like a Brewers cart vpon the stones" (Strange Newes 275).

[10] Such puns, generally thought of as "the
lowest form of verbal joke" (Freud 50), pass unremarked, as is the case here.
The term "pun" entered the English langauge around 1650, and since that time
puns have been considered less than imitable rhetorical devices, and even
something to accuse someone of: Dryden faulted Shakespeare with deigning to
employ "clenches," or puns. There is a sizeable amount of recent scholarly
work on puns, however. Derrida discusses them in "White Mythology," Margins
of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1982). Puns, like metaphors, Derrida argues, were originally "sensory and
material" (211). Abstraction, especially philosophical abstraction and other
forms of "interminably explicative discourse" (213), elides the traces of
this "primitive meaning" and has in its course "erased piles of physical discourse"
(212). Also, Jonathan Culler's On Puns (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988)
contains a wealth of informative essays.

[12] Latin Scholar J. C. McKeown has noted
that there is "no precedent for this conceit" of the stolen foot (13).

[13] Marlowe's translation of these lines
does not support my own, but neither is it terribly faithful to the original:
Let my verse be six, my last five feet;
Farewell stern war, for blunter poets meet. (lines 31-32)

[14] The kinds of tongue movements Hamlet
may mean are suggested in Ben Jonson's English Grammar. For nearly
every letter of the alphabet, Jonson gives an account of the necessary tongue
motion. When pronouncing 'a' before the letter 'l' it is uttered with "the
tongue bent back from the teeth" (Jonson 471). The sound of 'e' is made with
"the tongue turn'd to the inner roofe of the palate, and softly striking the
upper great teeth" (471), and 'i' is formed by "a lesse opening of the mouth;
the tongue brought backe to the palate, and striking the teeth next the cheeke-teeth"
(472). "O, Is pronounced with a round mouth, the tongue drawne back to the
root" (475) and 'u' is sounded with "some depression of the middle of the
tongue" (476). Jonson also gives an interesting account of 'r' which is "the
Dogs Letter, and hurreth in the sound; the tongue striking the inner palate,
with a trembling about the teeth" (491).

[15] This work was published posthumously
as Weldon is believed to have died in 1649. The title page declares that he
was an "eye, and eare witnesse" to James I.

[16] For more on the intersection of history
and phenomenology, see Jean-François Lyotard's section on "Phenomenology and
History" in Phenomenology. Also, for a more systematic treatment of historical
phenomenology see Bruce Smith's essay "Premodern Sexualities" in PMLA.

[17] Joseph has argued also that couplets
may have been voiced by Elizabethan acotrs in a manner "not unlike the full-close
in opera" (63). Joseph's evidence for acting style is disputed by O. B. Hardison.

[19] Antony Easthope usefully points us to
John Stevens's discussion (Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court,
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979) of the relation between song and music in the
Renaissance: "... in the fourteenth century 'the natural and necessary union
of music and poetry finally broke up' [Stevens 53]. Each achieved the status
of autonomous arts, and the autonomy became the basis for a new relationship
between them. From now on in song words and meaning dominate music. The music
is treated as a kind of ornament or addition to the 'subject matter' of the
words, being made to resemble or imitate meaning in various ways" (Easthope
96).

[20] Against such a notion, Friedrich Nietzsche
proposed that poetry has its origin in music. Lyric poetry, he says, is "the
imitative fulguration of music in images and concepts" (55). Poetry for him
was words set to music, not music set to words.